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Vancouver Sights

Beaty Biodiversity Museum

Fodor's Review

If you can imagine a vast underground library but instead of books, the stacks are filled with bones, fossils, and preserved lizards, then you can begin to imagine this modern museum on the UBC campus that exhibits more than 2 million specimens from the university's natural history collections. The most striking attraction hangs in the entrance atrium: a 25-meter-long (82-foot-long) skeleton of a blue whale—the largest on view in Canada (the blue whale in New York's American Museum of Natural History is 94 feet long). On the lower level, you'll find scads of animal skulls, taxidermied birds, and other creatures displayed through glass windows (many of which are at kids' eye level). In the interactive Discovery Lab, you can play scientist yourself; you might compare the claws of different birds or examine animal poop under a microscope. There's also a family space stocked with books, art supplies, and kid-size furniture. To find the museum from the university bus loop, walk west to the Main Mall and turn left; the museum is just south of University Boulevard. A Museums and Gardens Pass will save you money if you're planning to visit several attractions at UBC.